In my own experience, these are often just used to get students introduced to python; and also it makes it easier to check / verify the answers and grade them, since you can go through the thing easily as supervisor. Other than for e. g. such courses, I don't use spider or any fancypants IDE myself. For me the real IDE is the commandline + linux in general and of course tons of scripts, aliases and what not to work with the code. Most IDEs are also making things more complicated than need be, in my opinion, but if you already know one very well, such as code, spider should not cause any issues.